The silence swelled around us, mixing with the cold and pressing into our skin. Another mosquito zipped past my ear and I sat up.
“I’m freezing,” I announced. “I’m ready to go inside.”
“I’m gonna stay out here a bit longer.” I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was rickety and small.
As I headed for the cabin, fear slipped beneath my porous skin. My flashlight made only a pathetic globe of safety in the dark; beyond it, Lake Novak faded into a blackness so consuming, I couldn’t be sure the rest of the world hadn’t disappeared.
I was almost at the door when my flashlight clipped some shivery motion. I jumped and searched in the dark, and a trapdoor of horror opened inside me when I found it: Beneath a pall of flies, a dead rabbit lay on its side. Its neck was gashed and bleeding red-black.
Kristen’s words returned to me: I wanna kill the little assholes. And with the audio, a visual, Kristen’s confident hatchet swing.
No. I took an involuntary step backward. My sandal clipped the edge of a fat root, and suddenly I was soaring through the air. My arm banged into a tree and I clawed at its bark as I fell to the ground. I sat there for a second, waiting to see what hurt. Then my ankle erupted with pain.
“Kristen!”
My cry scattered through the trees, reverberated around the lake, rose toward the umbrella of stars.
I cleared my throat and tried again, deeper this time. “Kristen! I need help!”
I listened so hard I could feel my ears straining. The crickets answered, then a few errant frogs. A lonely owl—no, maybe it was a coyote.
No, a wolf. I looked around, nerves thrumming, like my blood was on fire.
“Kristen?”
No reply. I trained my flashlight on my ankle, prepared to see the area purple and gray and shiny-taut. But there was nothing there, nothing to show I’d fallen.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and I screamed.
“You scared the hell out of me.” I pressed both palms into the pine-needle ground.
“I scared you? I thought you were inside! I almost peed myself when I saw someone out here. Do you mind not shining that in my face?” Kristen covered her eyes and I lowered my flashlight.
“I was yelling for you.” I couldn’t hide the crossness in my voice. “I fell and hurt my ankle. How did you not hear me?”
“Oh my God.” Kristen dropped to her knees and inspected it. “I’m sorry! I had my earbuds in. I did a guided meditation on the dock.”
“It really hurts.”
“I bet it’s a sprain. Those suck.” She hoisted herself up and slid her arm under mine. “Let’s get some ice on that. Here, I’ve got you.” Putting weight on my leg triggered a blast of menthol cold. “Lean against me. Let’s go.”
Kristen set me up with my foot on a chair, a bag of frozen peas resting on top. She gave me two ibuprofen and rustled up a first-rate first-aid kit, with an old tube of arnica cream and an anemic-looking Ace bandage, which she looped across my ankle and fastened with two clips, their hooks sinking into the fabric like fangs.
“Did you see the rabbit outside?” I asked as she repacked the kit. “I don’t know what would do that to it.”
“Probably a coyote,” she replied without looking up.
I glanced down at my ankle, bound like a mummy. “You’re probably right.”
* * *
—
Kristen went to bed before me, and I stayed curled on the couch, in the dome of light beneath an antique lamp. Moths throbbed against the window screens. My brain clicked and clattered, a wooden roller coaster ascending its hill. What had happened with Jamie that pushed Kristen to deface her yearbook and destroy the carving? How could she remain so blasé about the discovery of Paolo’s body? And our conversation on Thursday, when she’d briefly convinced me she was as shaken as I was—why did that now feel like a trick, a trap?
I hobbled to the kitchen counter and turned on the hotspot—this time I’d plugged it in myself. Jamie Rusch: My heart hammered away as I spilled her name into a search bar on my laptop.
I scanned the results hungrily, then felt the Earth lurch, spin off its axis. I clutched both fists to my lips.
An accident, Kristen had told me. An accident had claimed Jamie’s life.
But it wasn’t true.
In the very same month that Jerry and Anne Czarnecki died in a raging fire, young Jamie had killed herself.
And Kristen, formerly her best friend, currently mine, had lied about it.
CHAPTER 25
Jamie Leigh Rusch Memorial Fund—the website looked good, professional, even, with a black-and-white photo of the grinning girl that stayed stuck in place as the text over it scrolled. An extremely upsetting metaphor: Jamie, forever trapped at twelve while the rest of the world moved on. She was awkward in that preteen way, with spindly bangs and a shy smile and skin as shiny as a newly waxed car. I squinted at the photo—she did look like me. Same brown, wavy hair and full brows.
In blue, near the top, the fund’s motto: Raising mental health awareness and serving the greater community. Then all the phrases that made the cause of death clear: “ending stigma” and “access to mental health care treatment” and even a bit about changing our language, “brain illness” instead of “mental illness” and “died by suicide” in lieu of “committed suicide.” An embedded video near the bottom showed Jamie’s parents speaking at a big black-tie fundraiser, and I watched it with the sound turned off. Then I clicked on Gallery, expecting photos from past fundraisers, but—oh, God—it was photos of Jamie.
Jamie as a bonny baby, with apple cheeks and a button nose. Jamie as a toddler, holding a drippy ice-cream cone with something like reverence. Gangly school-age Jamie with a basketball tucked under her arm. The last photo centered on junior-high Jamie in a silky green basketball jersey and shorts. Her teammates held her up on their shoulders: adolescent girls cheering and smiling at her, all braces and frizzy hair and bodies in the extreme, some tiny and compact, others stretched-out and gawky. Oh, what an age: broad, sudden swings from baseline, our largest deviations from the mean right when we’d kill to be quote-unquote normal.
Kristen had been very into basketball back then, too, so I scanned the faces one by one. My heart jumped when I found her—while all the other girls were gazing up at Jamie, who’d presumably sunk the winning basket, Kristen was in the back, eyes uncertain, staring straight into the camera.
I found Jamie’s obituary: survived by her parents, Thomas and Jennifer Rusch, and a little brother, Luke. Found dead on November 24, 2001. Two weeks to the day after Kristen’s parents died.
Her best friend and both parents had died in the same month. And she’d never mentioned it.
I scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw that the address for the memorial fund was in Las Vegas, that wacky man-made oasis. I googled the elder Rusches; the mom was in marketing, the dad a realtor in Henderson. Far from their Wisconsin dwelling, the pineapple house between Kristen’s first home and Nana and Bill’s mansion. The Mojave Desert is another spot where there are hardly any shadows, sun-splashed by day and moonlit at night. The kind of place where you could bury a body but the stars, all those floodlights, wouldn’t keep it in the dark for long.